trust you are: I hope you will become
more so. You may even have sound principles and good habits; but if
people generally do not like you, it is because there is something
wrong in yourself, and the best thing you can do is to study out what
it is and correct it as fast as possible. Do not for a moment fancy it
is because you are superior to other people that they dislike you, for
superiority never, of itself, made a person unlovely. It is invariably
a defect of some sort. Generally it is a defect arising from training,
and therefore possible to overcome.

For instance: two girls in the country have each a pony phaeton. One
drives her sisters, her family, her guests, her equals, and never
thinks of going outside that circle. Another does the same; but, more
than this, she often takes the cook, the laundress, or the one woman
who often is cook, laundress, housemaid, all in one. And to them the
drive is a far greater luxury than to her own comrades, who would be
playing croquet or riding if they were not with her. Now and then she
invites some poor neighbor, she takes some young sempstress or
worsted-worker to town to do her shopping, she carries the tired
housewife to see her mother, she asks three little girls--somewhat
crowded but rapturously happy--three miles to see the balloon that has
alighted on the hill; she drives a widowed old mother-in-Israel to a
tea-drinking of which she would otherwise be deprived. These are not
charities. They are courtesies, and this bright-faced girl is sunshine
in her village home and, by and by, when her box of finery is by some
mistake left at the station, a stalwart youngster, unbidden, shoulders
it and bears it, panting and perspiring, to her door-step, declaring
that he would not do it for another person in town but Miss Fanny! And
perhaps he does not even say _Miss_ Fanny--only Fanny. Now she could
get on very well without the villager's admiring affection, and even
without her box of finery; yet the goodwill of your neighbors is
exceeding pleasant.

Another thing Fanny excels in is the acknowledgment of courtesy, which
is itself as great a courtesy as the performance of kindness. If she is
invited to a lawn party or a boating picnic, whether she accept or
not, she pays a visit to her hostess afterward and expresses her
pleasure or her regrets; and she pays it with promptness, and not with
tardy reluctance, as if it were a burden. If she has been making a
week's visit away from